Quit smoking on Earth Day

Celebrating Earth Day today, what does it mean to you? What should it mean? Does the earth need our help to keep it going? No, irrespective of what we do, the planet will keep dancing around the sun for millions of years to come. Earth Day is about acknowledging our debt to the planet and preserving the planet for our own good! Preserving the flora and fauna and its abundant resources that we have come to take for granted, till now.

The air with its right combination of gases to keep us alive, water – that ingredient which goes to make most of our constitution, nutrient rich soil that allows us to grow food, trees that give us our supply of oxygen besides holding onto precious water and minerals, all this and more make our lives possible. To ensure that next generations have their lot, we need to stop in our tracks and take stock of how we are treating the planet and its resources. Earth Day gives us a chance to do that, and make the changes required.

In places like San Francisco, they have launched a project to map urban trees! In a city like Bangalore, every day trees are uprooted to make way for wider roads. Even the ones left intact are stuck in concrete in a way that does not make them healthy. One rain, one gust of wind and they come crashing!

Malls are thick with people on an unending buying spree. Where is the need for so many things? How long more can we keep making things out of a limited basket? More important, what of the things rendered useless? Where does the waste end up?

Earth day is the right occasion to rededicate ourselves to a sustainable way of life. Use less water and less disposables, recycle wherever possible – for instance, schools and parents must encourage children to use old notebooks for rough work, undertake projects to make things out of old stuff, plant and care for trees, etc.

Earth Day this year coincides with World People's Conference on Climate Change and International Year of Biodiversity.

Youth can think innovatively to help. Maybe by quitting smoking! The remnants of cigarette smoking represent the most prevalent form of litter collected across the world. According to data from the Ocean Conservancy, in 2009 more than 3 million cigarettes or butts were picked up internationally from beaches and inland waterways as part of the annual International Coastal Cleanup.

Cigarette production and consumption do contribute to global warming. For example, deforestation in order to grow tobacco and provide wood for curing it, means fewer trees available to absorb carbon dioxide.

As we have been saying here in this blog, all our problems in the end boil down to how we use and produce energy - the one thing we can actually control.

The carbon was in the air first till the trees and animals that died put them into the soil and we humans have frenetically been burning the fossil fuels and returning the carbon into the atmosphere, with a vengeance! This must be stopped.

In the process, we have helped accelerate the speed at which species are going extinct. Whether it be plants or animals, the rich biodiversity is a linchpin that holds intact the ecosystem that works so well for us. We need the biodiversity to stay just as we need to preserve the soil and glaciers.

Clearly, there is lot of undoing to be done. Earth Day could be the starting point.